One server now, the same image and env vars for many later: point
DJANGO_DATABASE_URL / DJANGO_REDIS_URL at central services, set a bucket, drop the
db and redis services, run several web containers behind a load balancer. No code
changes.
The wildcard certificate is what shapes this. Subdomain tenancy needs
*.rosterchief.app, and Let's Encrypt will not issue a wildcard over HTTP-01 -- only
DNS-01 -- so Caddy is built with a DNS provider plugin and needs an API token. That
single constraint is why the proxy is Caddy rather than the usual nginx+certbot.
The image apt-installs libpango and friends, which is what WeasyPrint binds to. The
PDF invoices that cannot render on a Mac without Homebrew work in the container by
construction.
Migrations are NOT run by the entrypoint: with more than one web container they
would race, and a starting gunicorn worker is a bad place to discover a failed
migration. Deploy runs them once, explicitly.
Two things the local build check caught, either of which would have failed the
image build at collectstatic (manifest storage treats a missing referenced file as
fatal):
- chart.js ended with a sourceMappingURL pointing at a .map we never vendored.
Stripped, with an npm script so re-vendoring cannot bring it back.
- The Tailwind INPUT file lived at static/src/app.css, inside the served static
tree, so collectstatic collected it and then choked on its @import "tailwindcss".
It belongs outside: it is a build input, not an asset. Now assets/app.css.
Verified locally under gunicorn + WhiteNoise + manifest storage: pages serve and
the CSS comes back hashed. The image itself is unverified -- there is no container
runtime on this machine.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Bernard Siebens
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